The Family (w/Susan E. Tifft)

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ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF JOURNALISM about the New York Times and the Sulzberger family… Describes the one-hundredth anniversary party of the “Times” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art… Forty blocks south at the New York Public Library, the centennial was being marked more sombrely. Tells about an exhibit on the “Times”’s coverage of the Holocaust in the Second World War… In the seven years that we have spent researching a biography of the Ochses and the Sulzbergers, it has become increasingly apparent that the family’s self-image as Jews has profoundly shaped the paper… In its early years, the paper was forbidden to mount crusades of any kind, with the exception of the Leo Frank case… Ochs was devastated by Franks’s lynching… During Hitler’s rise to power, Ochs refused to believe that the cultivated society of his forebears could be seduced by Hitler’s corrupting charisma. But after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, in 1933, Ochs began to recognize the grim realities of the Third Reich. With considerable anguish, he made an unprecedented decision: he banned all letters to the editor concerning Hitler. To demonstrate a lack of bias and to court subscribers, the Times’ editorial page had always been an open forum for readers’ views on every side of every issue. If Ochs were to continue that policy, he would be honor-bound to publish letters in support of Hitler, however anti-Semitic—and that he could not bear. … Nonetheless, as the Holocaust scholar Deborah E. Lipstadt demonstrated in “Beyond Belief,” her 1986 book about press coverage of the Final Solution, the Times frequently buried important news stories instead of putting them on page 1. For example, a dispatch dated July 2, 1944, which cited “authoritative information” that four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths and that an additional three hundred and fifty thousand were to be killed in the next several weeks, received only four column inches on page 12; the same issue carried on the front page an account of Fourth of July holiday crowds. … The current publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., has continued to take a hands-off approach to news and opinion, and, like several of his cousins, he has only a tenuous tie to his Jewish heritage. His mother, Barbara Grant, wasn’t Jewish, and shortly after she and Punch were divorced, in 1956, she became an Episcopalian. Eventually, Arthur and his sister Karen were confirmed at Manhattan’s St. James Episcopal Church. At the time, Punch was discomfited about his children’s being brought up as Christians, but not enough to insure that they were brought up as Jews. “I didn’t do a damn thing,” he later admitted…. Recently, we asked Punch Sulzberger whether the family now considers itself Jewish. He replied, “It’s a family that to a great extent tries to operate in the best part of the Jewish tradition—the Reform tradition we were brought up in—and those principles are spread pretty well through the family.” Asked to enumerate the principles, he said, “Sharing with people who are less fortunate; tolerance; social justice.” They are, he added, “very similar to the principles that guide the New York Times, and the family is very interested in insuring that those principles continue.”… In 1994, two years after he became publisher, we asked Arthur, Jr., to describe his personal faith. “I have the Times,” he said without hesitation. “That’s my religion. That’s what I believe in, and it’s a hell of a thing to hold on to.”